Reading Break Week - Sketch Two

After Sketch One was done, we were introduced to Sketch Two which was to work with cameras and Max MSP to create an environment interaction.

During this week, we worked with Max 5 in the labs to get familiar with the program and to learn some of its capabilities and functions. We have also formed teams for Sketch Two.

During the Reading Break, my team and I have begun to brainstorm what we wanted to do for this project. We have had a few ideas and concepts. We didn't want to create something that would trigger just an object, but further push this idea. A few concepts that we came up with were:

1. Having the user interact with an environmental map. Since we're Super Mario fans, we wanted to create a Super Mario environment with pipes, mushrooms, monsters that could be interactive when we put our hands on the object triggering an event to occur.

2. Second, was a concept similar to the breath analyzer and bubble concept that was talked about in class. This was a very vague concept idea that we thought about but didn't really elaborate on this.

3. Our third concept was the concept game of Whack-A-Mole. Everyone has played whack-a-mole or is familiar with this game. It can be played in arcades, on the computer, etc. It's a game where moles pop up from holes and you whack it with a hammer. We wanted to create this, but in terms of an interactive environment. We all agreed on this concept after brainstorming for awhile and this was the one we wanted to produce.

With this concept in mind, we wanted to put this concept into Max 5 where we use a camera to show the map of the moles and the player interacting with it. On the patch will be pixels of pipes, the background and the moles coming out. We have thought about using a glove to use to track the motion (color tracking) to make this effective. The user will wear the glove to play the game. We have to program it so the distance between the gloves and the point of interaction will work. If the mole is at a certain coordinate, it will trigger a point in the game for the user and if the mole is not in that area, nothing will happen and no points will be recorded.

We took this idea and talked to Greg during our lab this Wednesday, he liked the idea but wanted to challenge us and push this project further. He gave us the idea of having more animals (i.e. Elephant, Rabbit) and depending on these types of animals, you must have a certain speed to gain points. So a rabbit, you can touch it at a slow speed because its a small animal, but if its an elephant, you have to go much faster (giving more strength) because its a huge animal. This challenges our initial idea a bit more because now we would have to figure out how to change the speed and getting the glove (color tracking) to track each object with our glove. Our biggest challenge is to program the mole to record the point. After achieving that goal, all we need to do is duplicate and change the speed of things.